I'm hoping developers/collaborators of Gentoo will read this because they really must know how I feel.

The quick of it is that I heard mumblings about this Gentoo linux distribution within the past year, and after a little pushing from a Gentoo-using long distance friend, along with some MS troubles, decided to switch back to linux with this new distribution, and I'm loving it, and this time, I'm in it forever.

Here's where I stand, I'm a highly experienced computer user, though I say that with caution of course, as most of my experience pertained to windows. I was a big DOS user way back with my 386, helped with a BBS for a while in my town, had floppies loaded with midi at the time when my first mp3s took the entire computers processing ability to perform, worked at a computer repair store for years, sold computrs in retail for years, and did a short stint at college for CS. CS wasnt my thing, I'm still in college figuring what else I wanted to do.

Okay so thats who I am, no genius, but no neophyte either. I think years ago, I remember having SO much fun with computers, figuring out how they worked electrically/physically but also how they operated internally/logically. But over time I think I grew complacent, primarily due to Windows further abstracting the user from the hardware underneath.

I first tried out Linux in... 97? 98? Around there, it was Slackware, and I dont know what kernel/x/whatever versions it was, but I didnt stay for long. I couldnt get things up the way I needed, had school work to get done and print out, and 24 hours later I was back with my familiar setup. I think I was on a P133 at the time.

Between then and 2000, I would try out linux numerous times. Sometimes downloading isos but before I had a burner, I felt better getting boxed sets, as it came with support (heh...) and was more convenient. I think I tried Redhat v?, Mandrake (The first version of it, I remember that), and finally SuSe... ooh, and then the first version of Caldera OpenLinux, if that is what it was called, whenever this was. But it wasn't after 2000, I know that. So, I've always been highly drawn to Linux, for the main reason that everyone here would be. The stability/security/performance of it combined with the amazing concept of its philosophy - which I think boils down to FREEDOM, of choice, and from constrictions. In fact, ever since that 97/98 time, I've always evaluated my hardware purchases on whether or not they worked with Linux, in the event of a future switch, and I always evaluated new computer-related hardware with the thought of cross-compatability in mind. Almost being a Linux pundit w/o knowing much about it.

The longest I had ever used Linux was maybe two weeks, before switching back. The reason to always going back - was for a number of reasons. Familiarity with a GUI and basic filesystem structure, device structure, homogeny with other computers I have to deal with in my life, and the big one, hardware and software compatability. Slackware, I never got into X, but luckily that cd was given to me by a friend. The other distributions later on, would get into a gui but getting running in high resolution/color depth never happened, and we were still using modems and the whole modem dialing/ppp was an issue. But I think one of the primary problems was documentation and support. You NEED someone to hold your hand, not just through the install, but through the following weeks, getting everything up to 100%. Some distributions installs were very easy, but aftewards, just tossed me into this half polished gui, with little instruction on how to get to the config I needed. (Early KDE and Gnome were... interesting... and before that I think I was using one of those uuber basic afterstep or simpler, with the right click menu being it.)

So... I always returned because I wanted something I was familiar with, and never had the time to "invest" in linux, to get to know how it works well enough that I would feel comfortable with it. Also, I was a big gamer then, and gaming in linux wasnt where it is today (way more games now, and I play them less... so its a much better fit... dual booting was a pain for the week it lasted).

But, unlike most Linux Zealots, I don't hate Windows, and never did. Bill's been good to me. 98 pre-se was a joke that I never had to deal with, and me apparantly was too, but I avoided both of them. In 2000 I reformatted from 98se to nt4.0 for a few months, then got an illegal copy of 2k server, and in early '01 when me users were everywhere, I just went for it and bought a Win2k Pro disk (I've been a legal dos, windows, windows 95, win98se user up until nt and 2k - good boy). XP came out but I stuck with 2k for two years, until a year ago, where I "upgraded" to XP. But in the process, actually copying the hard drive image to a computer, using it, and copying it back, so while I was using an operating system 3 years running since a reformat, it was still very stable. Using it almost daily for an average of 4 hours a day, 2k/xp never crashed, or maybe it did but it was so rare I don't remember. I had it running as minimalistic as you can get XP going. I think it ran so well, that I just lost my interest in computers. Computers was merely a portal for email/web/aim/educational needs. The p3 600MHz processor underclocked to 400MHz (for stability that I wasnt getting @ 600), was all I could ever need... a system 2x as fast would gain me little, and I'm still using it now.

So what made me switch over, AGAIN, this time however, what I feel will be permanent and final? (The main point of this post.) GENTOO.

YAAY

Well, it's more than that. Gentoo is what is making me not run back any time soon, not for the foreseeable future (I forsee the next 5 years or so.) The reason to the switch, was sooort of spyware. Not on my machines, but the recent plague on windows boxes. Are you linux people aware of how invasive spyware has become in Bill's world? It's disgusting. Me, being the aavid Microsoft OS user, never ran into much of a problem, but I did have a few instances of spyware doing some minor damage that took a while to repair. Adaware & Spybot, along with some other little utilities, got rid of the ~50 or so objects that were causing harm. MSIE and MSOE were the ones to blame, so I did my best to remove any remnanse of Outlook Express off of my computer, and tightened up the security in IE as much as possible, allowing only one site in to the trusted site list (windowsupdate.microsoft.com), updated my setup, kept that in a corner, and started using some of the new modern open source software, and I was amazed. Firefox & Thunderbird were faster, more feature filled, minimal bloat, effective. No popups/ads, safer email, no ActiveX ugh, or popups or any window control. (I generally went to safew ebsites to popups were rare.. but still.) I also got GAIM, which was equally more feature filled, open, cleaner. Photoshop (granted, illegal) was replaced with the superior GIMP, for me at least. The only game I played was q3, and the only new game I forsee playing is D3, which will mandate a hardware upgrade.

So I said.. should I try the switch again? Even though I followed Linux on slashdot and the register along with other tech sites, I was pretty jaded to using it, and was convinced I wouldnt last a week. But all this great open source software on my windows box was amazing, and I figured that I should indeed make the next step. A goood friend of mine reminded me about Gentoo (which I had heard only mumblings about), and told me that he had been using it for almost a year. While I remember him talkinga bout switching to it - I assumed he had come back since then. So, he basically pushed a bit, and pointed me in the right direction, to the Gentoo handbook and other docs, and offered his online assistance. He also mentioned Knoppix as a backup/rescue option should I run into trouble.

So I had been drooling over the switch, and that "final straw" was oddly, doing some basic maintainance. I got my burner working again, which had been faulty for around 6mo, and this allowed me to finally do my backups of all my personal videos and artwork and documents... then I noticed that my /windows (EDIT HAH \windows rather) directory was over 2GB. That was it - thats what did it. I remember booting to dos on a floppy, and having a perfectly working windows setup <100MB, maybe <50.. .. and "2GB??? THATS MESSED UP!!!! WHO MAKES THIS CRAP???" Sure, it ran fine (sans my burner, but that was my fault), but 2GB shouldnt be needed to make it do so. Linux PDAs that I had been drooling over, TIVO... forget about this 2GB OS, I want that uuber scalable sizable modular one that doesn't ever have problems. Admittedly, a few hours later, I had gotten it down to 1.11GB, and I realized I was fooling myself... it was time.

Read the handbook through, started drooling a bit, picked my right iso, printed out the handbook, burned 2004.0 livecd stage1 whatevery, and a nice knoppix. Finished my bookmarks and chat logs backups.... slowly deleted everything off my windows system (as a method to more clearly show what I needed to keep), and then I decided to say a nice goodbye, because I kind of knew that would be it. I just wrote up a small text file... my final goodbye:

"Yeah, hi there again. We... have to talk. Yeah so I bet you've been wondering why I've been acting so strange lately. With the whole, deleting important files stuff, and all. Gee, I don't know how to say it, but I think our time is through. No no, it's not you, honestly, I've seen you grow to where I've never thought you would ever be. You don't give me many problems really, and I'll always have a soft spot for you in my heart. But... we're just not right for eachother. Maybe when we first met, we were, but we've changed. I'm sorry. I'll always remember you, and we'll always be friends, and I'll never speak poorly of you, I'm honest when I say that I will cherish what we did together, our lessons and memories, and you've done nothing but help me grow to where I am today. OH.. yeah, that Gentoo 2004.0 disc in your drive. Uh... ooh this is awkward... uhm, its nothing... I'm just midly interested... we're just freinds. I'm sure you'll find someone else in your future, and you'll continue to grow. Who knows, we may meet again some day. I'm sorry, take care."

It was pretty sad. The company that had provided all of my computing for over a decade was gone, and in particular, an operating system arrangement that I had been using without a format for over 3 years (which was my longest ever, and impressive apparantly for a MS setup). I can admit that a tear came to my eye when I left that message, and another one when that mkreiserfs whatever command did it's thing. For you recent windows converts, you may know how I feel.... its like a love/hate relationship that finally ended.

So... WOW LINUX IS AWESOME AMAZING IM LOVING EVERY SECOND OF THIS. ... rings sort of true. The detailed hands on, original-utility aspect to the install was great, it taught me a good amount in a short period of time. From my earlier stints with Linux, along with me always keeping an eye on it, I knew the basic commands to mv cp ls mkdir, remembered the basics about the multiple F1-F12 consoles, recalled the term lilo, the whole kernel, bash, X, window manager layering concept, recall using Xconfigurator and XF86setup to set up my XF86config file (which I think is what it was once upon a time, now being XF86Setup file, or xorg.conf in my case now, woot). In fact, my regular and rare encounters with the dos command prompt, still had me using ls instead of dir, all the time.... and the only ftp client I used was the BASIC ftp.exe that came with windows, which uses all those lovely unix commands.

So what's different this time? As said before, Gentoo. I installed exactly what I wanted, and none of what I didn't. My kernel is set up to exactly how I want it. I dont use a floppy, nor serial or || ports... why include support for them. All of what I need, none of what I dont. Everything is compiled for my exact cpu, with all the flags I'de be interested in. Gentoo doesn't have a happy installer, but rather, throws you into the game and forces you to learn things, and fix things yourself. Whereas earlier this may have stopped me, Gentoo's documentation and amazing forum was here to help. It took a few days to get everything up, and I still have to get my scanner/printer going, but after a few kernel compiles I'm getting the hang of it. It runs blazingly fast, is highly customizable, and looks beautiful. I've always been interested in Gnome, through it's concept, and thats what I'm using, although FVWM looks interesting. I've already read so much and learned so much, in these 5 days or so... but that was still fast enough to allow me to get back to work to finish up my ebay auctions. Yay.

I think the preinstalls of the other distributions just threw too much preinstalled junk in my face to try to catch my fancy or something, but I just got sick of it. I felt like I was booting up someone elses computer, and not MINE. Now I feel like I have control of every aspect of my machine. It also runs stable with my cpu at its official speed, 600MHz, and has been very stable at 800MHz as well. I'm addicted to this control.

So... while lengthy, I had to tell it to someone, even if noone listens. If you've skimmed down to here. I say it again, thank you gentoo, you made it possible. Sometimes I wish I had been exposed to something like gentoo back in 97 or earlier. I may have been far more knowledgable by now. How long has gentoo been out? Its a recent distribution I know that... but still... wow.

I'm still on Win XP and I'm like you - I don't hate Microsoft, in fact I reckon XP is great, but the whole spyware issue, IE problems, lack of full customisation and generally quite a bit of bloat have made me want to run Gentoo - which I'll be doing as soon as I can afford a computer of my own. I personally am going to carry on using Windows, but mainly Gentoo as I know it can do practically everything I want better. I'm still attracted to Windows games though

Welcome and have fun!_________________ always the same old taste, just new injury
well i'll wear the claws if you'd like that
yeah if you'd like that we can ride on a black horse
a great new wave hesperian death horse

Your story is similar to mine. I consider myself quite tech-savvy. In my circle of friends, everyone and their grandmother comes to me for their computer problems. I live in a tall apartment block. One time on a weekend. The doorbell rings. My mom opens up and these two kids are standing there asking for me. I had never seen them before, but they knew my name. As it turns out one of them had a fucked up Win98 installation and someone in the neighbourhood told him to come and see me. I was totally gobsmacked. I mean, I've been living here since the day I was born, but I usually keep to myself. My parents are the ones that know a few the neighbours. But still, totally out of the blue.
Ok, the point of that little anecdote was just to illustrate that Im not a noob when it comes to PCs. I got my first computer when I was 10 years old. Had dual 5,4inch floppies and a whole whoppin 512kb ram. I later upgraded it to a total of 640kb!! (No, not to run the newest ms-dos. I was trying to get this cad software to work.)

Anyways, since then I've been hooked to computers. my next machine was a 486 with a 50mhz cpu and a crazy whopping load of 8MB ram. Dos and Win3.1 were the usual fare back then. My next PC I got when I started College. A P133mhz 16mb Ram, later upgraded to 96mb. Win95+98 was a resident back then. Anyway, you can see where this is going.

My point is, Apart from NT, Ive done all the Windows's.
When I first became aware of linux, I didnt take it seriously. I thought why would anyone put themselves through the burden of doing things the unix way. Mind you, back then I had no Idea what the unix way was. From what I gathered, supposedly even simply navigating directories was supposed to be more complicated than a Commodore64 "run program" command.

I had no idea how wrong I was. But anways, at that stage, games were most important to me anyway. Internet for the mainstream was still in its infancy, so viruses and spyware were pretty much a non-issue. I mean it was enough to have some ancient relic of a virus scanner which hadnt been updated since the day it was released. The only way to get new software back then was either to buy it, or give the floppy drive a good workout.

It wasnt until I WinXP came around that I decided to take the first plunge into the linux world. Even though, considering the windowses, WinXP/2000 was the best of the lot. (not counting NT, since I never used that.)
But windows being windows, did the usual windows thing. Crashed, burned and took my partition along with it. That was the drop in the bucket the caused the flood. Thank god, knoppix was around. If it werent for knoppix, I never would have dared to try linux. So I tried knoppix, and woe and behold, the whole procedure was pretty painless. Of course I realised that this was only a temporary solution. But I was impressed with how complete linux seemed to be. All of the standard stuff seemed to be there. Web,email, video, audio,etc.
I wanted to try something more permanent. I fished around the web and my choice fell on Mandrake. I think it was version 7 or 8 at the time. Once again, installation procedure was painless. I was pleasantly surprised. But sooner or later I ran into problems. Most of it had to do with getting stuff to run that wasnt working by default. Mandrake made it easy for me, but it was too easy. I was afraid of using the console, because I had no idea what the commands and syntax were apart from a simple mkdir copy and so on. I never even realized that there was such a thing as tab completion.
Anyways, the trouble came around when I tried to setup things such as wine, samba and Unreal Tournament. Unreal Tournament was easy enough to install, but it ran like a tired dog on my Voodoo3000. And this, even though on Windows it ran super smooth. This was quite a dissapointment to me since up until then I had a firm belief that under linux everything was faster and more efficient. Of course I had no idea of the fact that it all came down to drivers in the end, and how small to non-existent hardware vendor support was in linux.
Eventually I also ran into rpm package dependancy hell and managed to fuck up my system, because I did not realise that rpms are distro specific.
Things stopped working. And eventually I reinstalled XP again.
Of course then the circle of installs just repeated itself. crash,burn, etc.
I wanted to give linux another chance. Since I was convinced that all my problems had to do with my lack of knowledge.
I thought I might try Suse Linux.
Again, same story, easy install, most of stuff works. But same problems as mandrake.
Eventually I stranded back at XP.
Start the circle of installs again.
Ok, this time I thought, if Im gonna do Linux, I might as well do it right. I'm gonna try and find the toughest (gui-less), meanest (manually edit config files), nastiest linux distro around. Ok, it wasnt quite that. I was just looking for a distro that would give me a hands on approach. Let me get my hands dirty and teach me about linux. I searched the web and the finalists were Linux From Scratch and Gentoo. In the end what decided it for me was the concept of portage and the possiblity of trimming the fat and perhaps resulting in better performance.

The installation forced me to deal with fstabs, mount commands, lilo configs, etc. The result of all of this. Im staying with linux. Most distros come with too many pre-installed apps. You have tons of stuff to choose from and usually they come several alternatives. Choice is a good thing, but the ability to choose well only comes after time and planning and careful consideration.
It was certainly refreshing to have to manually select each application I wish to emerge. Especially when considering compile time. That really makes you think about what you really need. At least during the initial install period. After all, you quickly wanna get to a working desktop.
Anyway, Im sure most of you know the rest. Bottom line is, gentoo has made it possible for me to stay with linux. The only other tie I had with windows was games, but thanks to ports, wine and winex. Windows is gone off my hd. This is the first time Ive ever dare to run a pure linux system. Usually I always had a dual boot set up, just in case something went wrong. But not anymore. In fact I'm now confident enough to start recommending gentoo to my friends.

Wow, that was a long post.

Anyways, all this talk has made me realise something. I mean, I'm not an idiot, under windows I always used a virus scanner, a software firewall, and once the problem arose, a spyware remover. But even with all that, using a different email program, being careful about what I download or recieve via email. Even with all that, spyware manages to slip through. Windows updates, intended to fix one thing, break another.

What Im trying to say is, if even someone like me has trouble with spyware and occasional viruses, how bad must it be for the average user. I mean winxp already comes preloaded with spyware. Search google for "alexa registry xp" and you'll see what I mean. Because of spyware on Windows, whenever I saw a game or an app on the internet which was available for free. I always became very suspicious. After all, the philosophy on windows seems to be, there is no such thing as a free lunch. One way or another you will pay somehow. Bonzai Buddy ring a bell? Never installed that, but my friend did and never managed to get rid of it. At least not via normal means.
And even I had to dig in deep and see were all that crap was hiding.
How the hell is the average windows desktop user supposed to deal with that?

Just a few weeks ago while I was at work. Me and my colleague were doing some video editing on one machine. then suddenly on the machine next to us, which wasnt actively running any apps, a porn website pops up. Completely out of the blue. I close it. After a few minutes it pops up again.
It might sound funny and we certainly got a laugh out of it, but we work in the Video/3D animation business, and imagine you've invited a potential client over to demonstrate a few things, and all of a sudden a big fat advert for "www.i-suck-horse-cocks.com" pops up. Well lets just hope the client has a sense of humour.

The threat of something like this happening on linux is much less. It could happen, but its not very likely. This is one of the many benefits of opensource. Sure, not everyone is a programmer and not everyone who programs actually reads through all the source code before they compile it. But still. If people like Bill Gates have been unable to keep privacy infringing code from being discovered in Windows, then imagine what it must be like with opensource.

It may be rather cheesy, but one of the classic BBS texts that always rang true for me was The Conscience of a Hacker by The Mentor. That feeling of a new world opening up before you. This was the feeling I got when first programming on Apple ][ and IBM PC, but I lost with Mac and Windows, and then regained with Linux -- its not GUI related. Something related to: I CAN fiddle with things if I want to. There is nothing forbidding me from looking at something, there are no barriers trying to protect me from my own stupidity. If something breaks under Linux, there's a clear error message telling you what broke and (usually) where to look to fix it. The fix is logical and directly related to what broke, there's no guesswork, no randomness, no relying on phases of the moon ...

This one girl I know asked me to help speed up her computer, and ad-aware found 590 objects!! Spybot another 50 or so.

Then another friend, who is supposedly pretty much on top of computers, I found over 1500 spyware objects with ad-aware, and another 300 or so with Spybot.

It's getting crazy over there.

I think if you are a savvy user and get rid of IE/OE, text only emails, switch to GAIM, surf and download sensibly, you wont ever need the anti spyware/virus software, but I had it just to verify every maintainance period.

Just like in Linux, there are a series of Daemons running in the bg (I mean, Services.) One of them by default allows for unscrupulous messaging. Thats just one of many little flaws. But if you run a tight windows ship, you can run it right. I mean, there ARE big web pages running IIS. Its just, not run by Joe Shmoe.

I didn't hate M$ all that much either until I started to become obessed with optimizing all my apps to run as fast as possible, and I kept running into nice little defaults m$ left around. Like the support user, back round messenger, msn installed by default etc...
Also I push this book alot but it helped me to hate M$ really fast._________________If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor. - Voltaire

The gist of my story is the same, I switched roughly a month ago. Since then I've booted to Windows twice, both times because I didn't have patience to get my kernel to cooperate with k3b and needed to burn some CDs. On the Windows side I've used 98SE for a few years with a 350MHz K6-2, then 2000 for another year or so, and another few months now with an AXP 2400+, XP for a week or two until the 'userfriendliness' pissed me off and I went back to 2000 yet again. Recently (May/June)-ish I downloaded the 2003 Server trial edition, because I had heard it was essentially the same as XP without all the excessive glitzy blingbling stuff that pissed me off -- this was/is essentially true, it's what I still have on my hard drive. As for spyware/viruses, I used Kerio/Sygate personal firewall, and had Ad-Aware/Spybot installed for safety's sake, but rarely needed them. Also didn't use a virus scanner... I caught a virus maybe twice (once msblaster only minutes after installing Windows, before I could install security measures), and once when I got an obviously virus-email, except with a .txt attachment, and I was like, wtf, .txts aren't executable? (And I wasn't using OE/IE, so was fairly confident that it was actually a .txt.) Opened it just for kicks, and turns out it did execute, though to this day I have no idea how. Either way, I managed to get rid of both that and msblaster by removing it from startup with msconfig and then just deleting the sucker.

On the Linux front, I had tried Red Hat 6 a few years back, and it basically sucked, didn't recognize my monitor correctly so a few inches of it sort of 'curled' off screen... I don't think I had that for more than a day or so. Then a few months ago in rapid succession I tried Knoppix, was impressed, installed it to disk and managed to completely b0rk it, next tried Mandrake, again was fairly impressed and used it for about a week until I got pissed off at the ATi drivers not installing, next Xandros but I basically just verified that ATi drivers don't work there, either before deleting it; I next got rid of my ATi for a GeForce4 Ti4200, and then installed Gentoo, which is what I'm using now._________________Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
last.fm

Wow great stories. Takes me right back. I suppose I'll share my story as well.

I too have used fairly well every windows besides NT (well, starting with 3.1 that is). My first encounter with linux was late '98 or early '99. I was walking through FutureShop with my dad - most likely after christmas - when my dad noticed a set of linux CDs in one of the cheapie bins. I'd heard the name before but wasn't familiar with it, but it sounded cool, and was real cheap. It was a November 1998 release of Slackware Linux. I played around with it a little, but didn't really get anywear. What it did do was to introduce me to linux. I stuck with windows - I'm still not entirely rid of it - but I kept coming back to linux. For a while the details get hazy, so I'm not sure how much later it is, but I remember looking for a good distro. I tried redhat and caldera, but they didn't work with my hardware. It was then that I found Mandrake. I really liked Mandrake. It worked with my hardware, was easy to install, and looked better than anything else. But even that didn't last long. I don't really recall what's happened in between, but the next major install was Gentoo. This happens years after the Mandrake incident. I'd been seeing more and more references to Gentoo in people's sigs, and decided to see what all the fuss was about. There wasn't any going back. It's kind of like what I feel about buying prebuilt computers now that I've built my own from parts. It may cost more, but I'm sure as hell not going to give up that sense of freedom and control. Recently I built myself a new computer, I was going to install windows on it first (I did once, but I used bad media so my install needed activation, and thus lasted only a month), but the complications due to needing SATA drivers, and not wanting to dangle my dads floppy drive out the side of my case deterred me. Instead I just installed Gentoo, and have been using that since. It's been a couple weeks now, and I have no idea when/if I'll get around to that windows install. Just too complicated trying to install it.

I think my Mandrake install lasted quite a while - must have been at least half a year. My first Gentoo install also lasted me quite a while. These days I use windows for games that I can't run in linux, and when I'm too lazy to install linux, or reboot if I already have it installed. It's funny, before I got linux installed on this system is was dying for it. I'd sit and imagine how completely awesome it would be. The themes, the programs, the, well the everything really.

My story is much the same as Choser, Chojin, and the rest, so it does not need to be shared in full, I suppose. I have also been a microsoft user since DOS 5.xx, when i was probably 8 years old. Since then I have gone through just about every MS OS, and yes, sadly, XP still resides on my hard drive (although my NTFS partition shrinks by a few gigs every week and my reiser4 partition grows the same...). Perhaps for my 18th birthday next month, my present will be completely removing XP once I am comfortable enough with that idea.

Sometime in July I started to become intensely interested (almost infatuated) with the concept of linux, and went on a downloading spree. I must have burned 20 ISO's by now (I've given quite a few to some friends, so I don't know for sure). I've tried Mandrake 10, Suse 9.1, Slackware 10, Knoppix, Arch Linux (which I stuck with for a while) and Yoper (which slightly disgusted me). I had, for the most part, the same problems as Chojin with the mainstream distros, and went in search of something to help me learn even more. Arch came close, but it still wasn't what I needed. I also narrowed my choices down to LFS and Gentoo, and, like Chojin, it was the package manager that sold me (along with good documentation and user forums). Someday I may try building my own from scratch, but for now Gentoo is wonderful.

Just wanted to share, and help show that most of us have a lot in common :p

Same as everyone else, I'm quite a fan of computers and have been since my first encounter...

Have been through everything from an amstrad cpc6128 and my first pc a 386sx @16mhz with a whopping 2mb of ram (KILLER machine for its time...) to my current P4 3.2 ghz..
My first experience with linux was probably around 94-95 and allong with everyone else i know that uses linux with the InfoMagix box sets (which i still think were a great idea... about 5 different distros + the entire contents of a few MAJOR ftp sites for linux software)...

If i remember correctly I chose slackware from that first box set....played with it even got as far as getting X to work I was only 15 at the time and although i had read enough on the Internet to be quite interested in a unix-style OS i simply had no idea of what to do with it

IIRC i tried to find as many things as i could through unix (set up my slip connection, used irc a lot, bbs etc.) but eventually something probably lack of space in windows forced me to remove linux ...That hapenned pretty much on every pc upgrade i did (new pc...more space...reinstalls...new boxset....dual boot...eventual removal of linux)

Then in 1997 I went to university to study Information Systems engineering....ended up using solaris in the labs until our department decided to stop paying license fees and switch all the machines to x86 RedHat boxes...At the time I was spending so much time under redhat at the labs and i just didnt see a reason to go through an install at my home pc...Then for 2 years i did an Audio Production degree and a) needed windows for my music apps + loads of space and also didnt really think of computers as anything more than a tool for the music stuff so Linux didnt really tempt me in any way (I was slightly burnt out from my first degree)...

Then I got a job where I am now..doing web developing mainly but a lot of sys-admin stuff and other programming tasks as well...The other developer in the company is what I can only describe as an absolute linux guru.....He reignited my interest in Linux outside work (where i was happy using it , seeing as i still remembered most of the stuff)
I did a Redhat 9 install at home ...quickly went to fedora core 1 and happily worked with that learning new things and catching up on advancements i'd missed ....I had heard about gentoo and around last christmas did an install on my previous pc....went fine and liked it but i only had a dial-up connection at home and i realised it wasnt really appropriate...around the same time i upgraded to my current P4 and left loads of space for a linux install...Since what with spending loads of time at work I didnt really use the pc at home much so I decided to wait till fedora core 2 was out to install that...

I had the same pc setup at work as well (running FC1).. When FC 2 was released i downloaded the ISOs...failed to install it miserably because i had an ASUS P800 motherboard. and decided to install Gentoo on that work pc...at the same time i had applied for my home adsl connection..
As soon as my adsl connection arrived i installed gentoo on my home pc as well and i've been happy as hell and it is by far my favourite distro..It also has renewed my interest in the "how-things-work" aspect of everything for which i'm eternally gratefull...

Right now i'm in the process of setting up gentoo on a p166 mmx laptop as I'm sure that if anything will bring a nice fast workable machine out of it , it is gentoo..